Gale & Delila Reed

              Eric Walz History 300 Collection
Gale & Delila Reed – Life during WWII
By Daniel Scott Bowman
March 10, 2003
Box 2 Folder 13
Oral interview conducted by Daniel Scott Bowman
Transcript copied by James Miller January 2006
Brigham Young University – Idaho
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DR: I went to Ricks in ‘ 43 and ‘ 44, and there were like two or three hundred girls up there and during winter quarter I think we had twelve boys because the ones that were deferred for farming came to school some of them. For dances, because nearly everyone’s boyfriend was in the service and we got all of the names of the guys that we left around in the area that all the girls knew about and we sent letters and invited them to our formal dances. I happened to have a date because I was going with a kid from around here and I got my husband a date with my friend ( laughs). It was fun, it was a girls’ school practically and the dances were just fun, everybody was… it was a good bunch of guys that we got invited and we had an orchestra, we had decorations and a lot of [ us] walked to the dance, it was over in the old tabernacle. The dorm that we lived was 72 College Avenue and that was right across from Porters on the west side of the street, you know were the front door of Porters is, and across the street there is a two story building and that was the girls’ dorm, top and second floor. Before there was any boys there ( that was before I was there), they had the boys’ dorm on the bottom floor level and the girls on the second floor and I thought [ that] would be pretty neat ( laughs).
DB: Yeah! You won’t see that any more.
DR: And we had a cook, Mr. and Mrs. Morgan were our cooks and they were in charge of that dorm and we had to take our turn with kitchen duty and when it was our turn for a week and a weekend we had to help with all of the meals and do the dishes, which was alright, but we got fat ( laughs), eating peanut butter and honey because we were starving we thought! But anyway it was neat, and I knew quite a few of the teachers because there was such a few of us that we got to know…
DB: How many teachers were there do you think?
DR: Oh, I would have to count what I could remember, there was Eldon Hart, Brother Bidhoff, Carol Kerr, and Minon Perry, and Mrs. Ricks, what was her name? Anyway I had a sister that went to school five years ahead of me up at Ricks and Mrs. Ricks always called me Clea’s sister, that was my sisters’ name, and I was Clea’s sister ( laughs)! But John Anderson was there…
GR: President Manwarning.
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DR: Yes, President Manwarning was the president of the college then and I was his secretary and he was a very dear man, just a great man, he was so good to work for, I just really liked him.
DB: Did you start to work with him your first year of college?
DR: Yes, I didn’t go back the second year because I got married ( laughs)! But I have wished since that I had gone back and then married him, not that I wouldn’t have married him, I wish I would have finished. There was Lama Delta Sigma, and the Alpha Theta sorority and the Purple Keys sorority that you were asked, you know if they selected you, you could join it and I was an AT, Alpha Theta and it was fun. There was lots of programs that we put on, but I didn’t go into the athletics at all up there, I don’t even know if we had it.
DB: I was noticing in the yearbooks, it was kind of interesting what I saw, like men sports in ’ 39 had a full team, 10, 15, guys, even back up and then by ’ 42 there are only five max on a team, just enough to play…
DR: Because there weren’t any boys around. When I was in high school ( now you probably don’t want to put this on there) but I was in high school in 19_... when was the war… 1941… but I was in high school and my junior year nearly all the boys ( we always dated the class ahead you know, the girls dated the boys in the next class), and there were very few… we had to date the younger kids because there weren’t enough.
DB: They all went to war…
DR: Yes, they joined, went early and didn’t graduate but they got their diplomas when they got home. And so that was how it was at Ricks, because everybody was gone.
DB: Let’s start back in the beginning a little bit. Were you born here in Idaho?
DB: In Ririe, yes.
GR: She lived on that side of town and I lived on this side.
DR: We didn’t date when we were in school. 4
GR: She was too young.
DB: Not until after college or during college?
DR: No…
GR: I was drafted into the service, I was going to Utah State, and I was going to school, and my brothers had all gotten into the service, so I was drafted on the farm, I didn’t have a choice. It was real nice because there was just a few guys around I went up there and dated these girls.
DB: Good pickin’s!
GR: ( Laughs) We got to know each other pretty well and…
DR: We got married and our kids went to Ricks.
DB: I would like to ask this question to both of you then. First of all, where were you and what were you doing on December 7, 1941, when you heard about the attacks at Pearl Harbor? Do you remember that day?
DR: Yes, I can remember my Mother, I can remember coming out to the kitchen, and I hadn’t heard it, but my mother was crying, because I had three brothers. That’s where I was, then we went to school that day and everybody was… you know… was just a sad thing. Some of the kids were excited it felt like but I had seen my mom cry so it wasn’t very exciting to me about it. Gale had a cousin that went down on the Arizona…
GR: He was from Ririe. He was just a little bit older than me.
DR: And I was going with a kid that was on the USS Bismarck and it was sunk but a lot of the sailors hung onto the burning wood and things and they were rescued. A lot of them went down but yeah I can remember the war.
DB: ( To Gale) What were you doing? What was your experience?
GR: I was at Utah State, at school, right after that I got word that I had to come home so I had to drop out of school and come home. My brothers were already so it was a big deal to us. Of course to me it had always been a 5
lucky deal because we ( he and his wife) got together because of that. We grew up in the same ward all of our life…
DR: And the same school.
GR: Always in the Primary together and the same school but she was three years younger than me. So that’s where I was at.
DB: So did both of you perhaps feel scared for a moment when you heard about the attacks?
GR: I was.
DR: Yeah I was afraid because of my mother, you know. We didn’t remember anything about WWI, just that we had uncles that were in it. This was the first war that we really remembered.
GR: My brother who was just barely older than me had joined the Coast Guard before the war started, so he was in Hawaii, that’s where he was stationed was in Hawaii when this all happened. There was a young man from Ririe that was on [ a] mission in Hawaii and they had got together and so after the big holocaust of the war, my brother had never gotten the opportunity to go on a mission so he went with this kid from Ririe that was over there on a mission, for all the rest of his service time he just did missionary work in the Hawaii Islands.
DB: How fun. Were you ever scared that perhaps the Japanese or Germans m[ ight] come to the United States and attack?
DR: Not like we are now. It was never a reality.
GR: The thing that I remember there at Utah State, I was in Lama Delta Sigma down there and of course we were all very active in it and President Romney, not the President Romney that was one of the First Presidency, but was a relative of his, was a supervisor, whatever you want to call it, of the whole LDS Institute there. He called us all together to tell us about it. He assured us that… well and Milton R. Hunter, I don’t know if you remember him or not, he was one of the General Authorities, he was one of the Seventy, in fact he wrote a book, Brigham Young the Colonizer, while he was down there he gave me his book before he published it, but anyway, the 6
two of them got all of the kids together and explained to us that we did not have anything to fear about. So goes the statement if you are prepared you need not fear, of course we weren’t prepared for the attack but America was prepared. He said not to worry about it out where we are, that this won’t happen to us, so after hearing those two brethren we felt at ease, now I don’t know what they told Delila up here…
DR: I don’t remember either. See I was in High School then, so it wasn’t… you know it was just a… I felt bad because all the kids we dated were gone you know ( laughs).
GR: Two of her brothers were there.
DB: How soon after the attacks did you see a noticeable drop in the number of young men in this area? Did they draft them right away or did it take a year or so?
DR: It didn’t take a year. See they didn’t have the National Guard, you know they have so many, but they did have to Reserves in schools, Gale’s brother was in Marine Reserves. But, no I can’t remember, but it was not very long until they were drafted.
GR: Most of the boys in her class just immediately…
DR: Joined the Navy.
GR: … joined the Navy and the service and were gone.
DB: Right out of high school then?
DR: They left school, the seniors…
DB: Oh really, they didn’t even graduate?
DR: They didn’t even finish their senior year and some of the juniors didn’t finish their junior year, so that was my class.
DB: They were really young boys then.
GR: Oh yeah. 7
DB: Now you said you attended Ricks College 1943…
DR: And 1944.
DB: What kind of social programs were you involved in at Ricks?
DR: Well, I was in the Alpha Theta sorority and that had a social… but the main things that we had were the wards. We just went to the ward there in Rexburg; it was the Fourth Ward then. It’s right on the corner… here is the Spori Building on this side…
DB: Oh that nice brick building on corner.
DR: Yeah. That is where we went to church. I came home quite often on weekends but that was the church that I went to when I was up there. And most of [ the] kids just belonged to, I don’t think there were any wards on campus, we just belonged to the wards that we lived in.
DB: What about activities, like co- ed activities, you already explained about the dances but…
DR: We didn’t have much co- eds except the dances and the kids, the boys that were in the school, most of them had steady girlfriends. But, we didn’t have many… we had dorm parties with the girls and we used to… the lights were turned out at ten o’clock in our dorm so if we did anything after ten we had to use a flashlight. And if we got caught we were in terrible trouble ( laughs)! There wasn’t much social life except for the girls, you know, the fun of living all together. There were sophomores and freshman both that lived in this dorm and we just did fun things. I was just telling Gale we were in Rexburg the other day and you know that we lived right there but we did not shop, none of us had extra money so we just… we didn’t shop. We didn’t have to buy our groceries because our food was prepared. We brought our cloths from, just the bare essentials that we ever shopped for. Now you go up to Rexburg…
DB: All kinds of stuff…
DR: … well now there are so many kids in the stores that you ( laughs)… but it’s great. 8
GR: Before there were department stores where you would buy your clothes, they had a lot of that in Rexburg at that time, which [ they] don’t have now.
DR: Yeah, they had more dress shops, good clothes, well not so much… I don’t remember they didn’t have many more… well there was a Penny’s and a Village Shop and Barretts. When our two daughters went to Ricks you could buy clothes or anything you wanted to in Rexburg, it was very good businesses then.
DB: Do you remember the school still having theatrical performances, having enough students to put on plays, or orchestra concerts and things like that?
DR: Let’s see, we had assemblies, because I can remember some of the funny things that went on. I think it was Morrel, Dr. Morrel’s son who played the violin and it was very, very good. He had a skit that went along with it, we all just liked, loved that part of it. Purple Keys and the Alpha Thetas had parties, you know with just the girls.
GR: Didn’t you have choirs that you were in?
DR: There might have been a choir, but I don’t think there was because…
GR: The choir director was taken, I know that.
DR: What?
GR: Your choir director before you got there was taken into the war.
DR: Well, John Anderson was there but he just had boys’ choir he didn’t have girls’ choir. If he did I didn’t sing in it and I would have. So there wasn’t much music in the school then.
GR: I can’t think what else they would have had up there back then.
DR: What did you come up to? Mainly dances that we invited him to.
GR: We would go to Silver Dance Hall in Idaho Falls or Rigby, I remember going up there and picking up her boyfriend told me that a bunch of these 9
girls would come to these dances. I don’t remember there being that many dances up there at Ricks College, there were a few but very few.
DR: Oh I can remember going to two or three one year, they were at the tabernacle. Anyway it was fun, it was a fun year.
DB: I bet.
GR: If I hadn’t of come around to marry her she would have been the student body president the next year.
DB: You would have been the student body president?
GR: I would have been but I got married.
DB: Oh I see.
GR: I have spoiled her for her whole life so that she could play student body president ( laughs).
DB: Well in her heart she was president!
DR: There were other reason why I didn’t go back. My brother who was just younger than I was going to Ricks…
GR: I will show you why I married her…
DR:… it cost a lot of money and I got a good job in the summer that paid really good so I just stayed on the job, and my brother went to school.
GR: Isn’t she pretty? ( Showing me their wedding time picture)
DB: Oh I can see why!
GR: I started losing my hair that is why I had to quick and get married ( laughs).
DB: Before time ran out!
GR: Before time ran out is right! 10
DB: You are very pretty.
DR: Well it was a fun time.
DB: Now you were at Utah State or University of Utah?
GR: Utah State.
DB: What years were you at Utah State?
GR: Oh, ’ 40… I graduated here in ’ 41 so I got down there in ’ 42, ’ 43, I started in ’ 44 and then I was sent home.
DB: How did the war affect Utah State?
GR: Oh, immensely. We had an ROTC program down there that would everyone would take anyhow not planning on a war and when the war came around boy, they just took people out of there in droves, hundreds of kids left immediately.
DB: What percentage of the young men left from that University?
GR: I’ll bet you 50% of the kids, boys left there for the service.
DR: His brother did.
GR: My brother was in the Marines, he was just ahead of me down there, we lived together down there and he was taken in immediately. That I know… I went back a year later to visit the guys down there and none of the guys I knew were still there for the next semester. It just really affected them, I am sure it did with all of the colleges. It affected all of the programs. Alpha Delta Sigma was so great down there they had maybe six girl chapters and six boy chapters and that was a lot of people and they just drained them right down. It had an affect.
DB: Now did you go back after the war?
GR: No, I had to stay home and make a living because I married that pretty little girl. No I didn’t. I wish I would’ve but I didn’t. I was drafted on the 11
farm and my brothers were all gone in the service so I farmed with my dad and he didn’t have any other help and all the guys didn’t come back to the farm so I stayed and that’s where we have been ever since. It’s been great but I wish I would have gotten my full education. So if I was going to preach anything else be sure you get your bachelor’s degree and work on your master’s if you can.
DB: That is a good plan. How did it affect the community in Ririe and Rexburg? How did the community respond to the war?
DR: They really… Ririe really supported the war effort and kids that were in the service. I didn’t know much about Rexburg business part but it took its toll on the towns because so many of their kids were gone and so many of them were killed.
GR: A town our size, it was devastating. The number of the kids that were killed and the number that were gone, I can remember it was hard on all of the programs in our little school and town fairs that we used to have a lot were just reduced to hardly anything, too many people were taken. They were scared, the people were scared. Mothers that had lost boys were just devastated. It was just a hard row to hoe.
DR: It was during then that they had shoe stamps, you couldn’t buy shoes unless you had your stamp.
GR: You couldn’t buy rubber boots for irrigating and stuff like that.
DR: And you had the Blue stamps and the Red stamps and that was for vegetables and meats, red stamps were for meat. It affected the people in that way. And gasoline, you got so many gallons of gasoline stamps.
DB: Did a lot of the products from around here go to the servicemen?
DR: We were at one time the largest wheat exporting place in the west. I think a lot of what from here went to the war effort. And there was a lot of Red Cross work, you know, rolling bandages, fixing kits that they sent overseas.
DB: Were you involved in any of those programs for the war?
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DR: Yes, it wasn’t at Ricks, it was here. We made bandages. My mother made rolled bandages and put them in the little kits and sent them overseas. I don’t know [ if] that was for the soldiers or for the people that were being so bombed.
DB: Now I understand that especially before the war there was a high Japanese population in Idaho. Did you know any Japanese families before or during the war?
GR: We knew some families that were involved but we knew them after the war. We knew where they were taken and that terrible… the thing that bothered me the most is that they immediately gathered them all up and forced them into; they weren’t called concentration camps they were called…
DR: Internment camps.
GR: Yeah, and put them into camps like down towards Burley down there…
DR: But you know what, it was necessary because…
GR: To save lives…
DR: Not only that but they were making lots of money and they were sending their money, so much of their money went to Japan, to help with the war effort, but it was risky to have them…
GR: Their families went down there for protection. You say the word Japanese the people came unglued, they wanted to kill them. And so to save these peoples’ lives they put them into camps with guards on them for their protection and so they wouldn’t be sending out any more of their income to Japan, which they were doing. But there was a lot of consternation over that. We met a Japanese family that later we got to know really well, very super good friends of ours, the wife and all the kids were members of the church and the husband never was. Their parents were all involved in those camps and first there was hatred until they discovered they were being protected. A lot of people would have killed them on sight because of the way they attacked Pearly Harbor.
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DR: But you know the schools that had… Sugar City had quite a few Japanese in their schools and they were in the schools because I remember one time we had these traveling assemblies, the high schools exchanged all the way around and we went to Sugar City and we didn’t think about how many Japanese kids there had been, me and a couple of my friends were singing trio and the song was “ It’s a Slap Mister Jap,” or something like that, I don’t know, very derogatory to the Japanese, but everybody thought it was great all of them except the Japanese. We felt really bad that we had sung that when ( we) got through and saw Japanese kids all over out there.
GR: They were all members of the Church up there too.
DR: Yeah, they were just ordinary nice kids. I don’t know what we sang it for to start with. But we did.
GR: Well it was real hatred. It was a real nationwide hatred for the Japanese and the Germans of course.
DR: But anyway it was fun years. In fact I had so much fun in high school and college that it was just good years.
DB: Where were you and how did you feel when you heard of the surrender of the Germans and then later the Japanese? Do you remember where you were at when you heard that those armies surrendered and the war ended?
DR: That was in 1945. That was the year we got married. Nope, you know I can’t remember. I can remember V- Day, you know about it, but I can’t remember… we were married.
DB: What were your first feelings when you found out?
DR: I was sure I was glad. It was a relief and I was glad. It took its toll on some of the older people, losing their kids.
GR: During that time we raised a lot of sugar beets. And they had a lot of German prisoners of war over here. And we would hire crews every fall to help us do our sugar beets, top them and prepare them and send them to the factory. And they would bring in about 20 of these prisoners to work with us but boy they brought guards with them, pack guns and machine guns and watched them all the time. We weren’t supposed to speak to them or 14
associate with them in any way. We did anyway because they were young good kids, so we got quite well acquainted with them.
DB: I didn’t know they had prisoners over here working, how interesting.
GR: These fields right around here we had a lot. They were good guys, they weren’t antagonistic, they were just prisoners of war. It was a hard feeling to see what they had to go through. Boy if they raised up to talk to you those guards would just about shoot them. They did sugar beets a lot different than they do now but I would drive the truck and work right along side of them and boy those guards would get so mad at us. We hated the guards worse than we did the prisoners of war.
DB: After the war, what was it like with the huge influx of returning G. I’s? I mean all of a sudden you have no one and then the war is over and they all come back, how did…
DR: You know in a town of this size it wasn’t that great except when the kids came home. But I don’t remember them coming home in a big…
GR: I don’t either, I don’t understand it, they must have…
DR: They must have because there were lots of kids…
GR: I do not simply remember them coming like you see in movies, coming in big train loads. They were so scattered by then that they came back one at a time.
DR: One thing too we weren’t in school anymore we were married so we weren’t in the social part of it.
GR: I was also [ p] ut into the bishopric on my 25th birthday so we had a lot to do.
DB: Wow. Did you see a difference in business or in the community?
GR: Picking up you mean?
DB: Yeah the rebuilding or reconstruction of it?
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GR: I don’t know, maybe because we were a little isolated town over here, I don’t remember anything really outstanding towards rebuilding and moving on but…
DR: I remember some of the kids like Bob Peterson, and my brother Bob and all these kids when they came home, they came to see us. Gale had coached the high school basketball team during the war because…
GR: All the coaches were drafted.
DR: And so we got to know so many of the kids good, a lot of them came back to see us after they got home. They were still just ordinary good kids having fun.
GR: Some of them would have real bad experiences and they would tell us about it, cry and feel bad. Many of them experienced the war, they didn’t experience any of the bad battles. My brother was a Marine in the battle of Guadalcanal and he wrote a book about this thick about his experiences and it is well worth reading because he told what happened. They would tell about how when they would get isolated they world manage to get a few LDS guys that were around and still have a sacrament meeting and a priesthood meeting and kept the church going but…
DR: I remember the teacher’s name, Edna, Edna Ricks. She had been there forever. She had never married and she was such a good English teacher.
DB: Now did you see action during the war?
GR: I didn’t get in the service, I was here on the farm all the time. I was drafted here on the farm. I didn’t have a choice. If I would have wanted to go they wouldn’t have let me, that’s because my brothers were in there and so there wasn’t anybody to help farm. The guy that was made the bishop when I was in the bishopric had the same experiences and was drafted on the farm. But I will tell you this, I didn’t dare walk downtown, all the mothers would say, “ Why aren’t you in the Army like my boy?” We would have to explain to them that their boy would starve to death if we didn’t have some food for him.
DB: So you were actually drafted to work on the farms?
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GR: Yes. I didn’t have a choice. I had to come right home, I had to stay here. I wasn’t allowed to go out [ and] do what the other kids would do, that was a good thing because the farms had to keep running. Quite a few of our friends were drafted on their farms because this whole area was a farming area. We raised potatoes, sugar beets, grain and hay, and…
DR: And cows…
GR: Oh yes and cows.
DR: We always had cows.
DB: Did you know close friends or relatives that died during the war?
DR: Byron Mason, Gale’s cousin died.
GR: One of my best friends when I was in school was shot down, another young man that lived just down the road, Johnny Moss was shot down over Germany and was killed, and another one of our friends, David Ririe was shot down but was taken prisoner. He was a prisoner of war for a few years. Dave Earl, on of our cousins was captured by the Japanese and he was on that famous death watch that the Japanese had. Oh lets see who else…
DR: I can’t remember…
GR: Those were all family and close friends.
DB: When you found out that the first relative or friend of yours died, how did you feel?
GR: This Byron Mason that she talked about that went down on the Arizona that the Japanese sunk on their first wave through. Our whole town went into remission over that, it just shook everyone because that was so close. And then these other kids started getting killed, you didn’t get used to it. It wasn’t something that you got used to. It affected our whole area. I remember seeing Byron’s name in the paper all over here and he was one of the first acknowledged as being killed. It’s hard.
DB: A lot of times, especially now looking back we see the movies that were put out during the time, they are very patriotic and everyone has high spirits. 17
Did that feeling kind of drop when you found out that men were really dying? That it is not the glory of war that they portray it to be?
GR: It’s not a movie. The real thing is not a movie. They enhance it and glorify it and all of that and they do all and show all these horrible things but when it touches that close… this Byron Mason lived right here in Ririe and he was one of our dearest relatives and we were very close friends, and it was hard. When you realize what it was all about, this next one scares me more than that, if it comes to pass. It affected us, our friends, our families and neighbors all over.
DR: My mother and his Aunt Nel were all good friends and when Byron was killed my mother wrote a poem about it and I was going to give it to Sterling but she wrote a lot of poetry and during the war it was sad poetry not like her others.
DB: I would like to ask both of you a question and I will first ask you. Do you feel that WWII has affected your life?
DR: Well, not really, I don’t think it changed my life.
GR: The only way that I can think that it changed mine was that I didn’t finish school and it is probably hers too. I didn’t go back and finish college and wished ever since that I hadn’t. I never did get to fulfill a mission because of the war.
DR: Well during the war you couldn’t go on a mission, you were drafted. And now I think that if that comes to pass again, we’ll have so many kids drafted that…
GR: We feel that being called into a bishopric so young really took the place of a mission. And it did. We were in the bishopric for 13 and a half years and we were young, all of us. And we feel like our lives have been spent doing church work, which is a blessing. Other than that I don’t know how it would have affected our lives any different than that.
DR: I think if I had a brother killed or something like that it would have affected my life more or even some of the kids out of my class but there weren’t any kids out of my class and they were all on ships all over. I think it might have affected me more. 18
DB: Well are there any other memories or stories that either of you would like to tell? Because when I transcribe this, it will be in the archives of the library so students for years to come will be able to read this…
DR: Well be careful what you put ( laughs).
DB: I will! But is there anything else, any other stories during that time that you would like to tell that you think would be important or interesting?
DR: Well, we found out that the wind really blew up at Ricks in the winter when we where walking up that hill to go to school. Oh I can never remember it being so cold as it was while walking up that hill. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything, the good times and the serious times we had at Ricks. We had assemblies and religion classes. I just can’t think of anything else. We had a student body officer you know like they had before. We put on a competitive assembly where each club had to put on their own… it wasn’t a skit it was like a road show you know, like a drama and each club would compete in that and that was fun. We got to know a lot of really good kids. And we had just really good experiences up there, but during the war the gas was rationed that we didn’t go back to Ricks for anything after that.
DB: How long after the war did the rationing stop?
DR: It wasn’t very long after the war was over that the food stamps and…
GR: You couldn’t buy cars, you had to be a real special person or a real special something to get a car. Transportation slowed down a lot. The gasoline and the rubber tires and all that were such a blow to us that almost immediately after the war all this came back because most of it was preparing to be sent to the war and it was being built up and so we did have a reserve but it was for the military, but since that was all over it was all turned loose to the public again, so that helped. We had those prisoners of war over here for a while after the war. Even though the war was over they still had to be guarded, in fear that they would rebel and want to cause trouble and until they had an opportunity to be sent home. I think everything reasonable soon got back to normal. It took a while of course to replace all of the stuff. Feeling against the Japanese took a long time to get over, feelings over the Germans took a long time to get over but as the Lord says, 19
“ I will forgive whom I will forgive, but you shall forgive all men,” and that had to come into play.
DB: Is there anything else that you would like to share?
DR: I tried to find my yearbook but we had our books downstairs in our book cases and ( they were all ruined). Gale’s were all ruined.
DB: Too bad.
GR: The yearbooks would have been nice because we had all these stories in those yearbooks from just the time we are talking about.
DB: I love looking at the library here at those, they are priceless, the records from back then. I think first hand experience, interviews like this, you know you can read books from historians but when you hear it right from the person’s mouth it makes a whole big difference.
GR: I have read stories and stories and stories about the war and all the effect it had and to this day when I read about my cousin Byron Mason and it chokes me up, it did then and it had ever since, not just me but not even our relatives but the community all around us have been affected by that. That is just something that you don’t erase.